


A Life of Adventure

by glorious_spoon



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Teamwork, Wilderness Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-23
Updated: 2017-05-23
Packaged: 2018-11-04 04:16:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10983186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: A search for a hidden Leviathan bunker in the wilderness goes very wrong, leaving Peggy and Jack stranded and waiting for rescue. But they aren't alone on the mountain...





	A Life of Adventure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sheron](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheron/gifts).



The bridge spanning the gorge was old. While the twisted rope fiber and silvered wood seemed sound enough to Peggy’s inexperienced eye, crossing those things was always nerve-wracking. This was the third one they’d encountered in as many days, though, and she’d certainly steeled herself to do much worse for the sake of the mission in the past few weeks.

That fiasco in Guayaquil, for example. The less said about _that_ , the better. It was looking more and more like their source had been spinning tales, but even a rumor of a Leviathan bunker was worth investigating--and anyway, she'd take hiking about the wilderness over charming slimy politicians any day of the week.

It was Jack she was worried about. He hid it well, but she’d seen the faintly green cast to his face when they crossed the last two bridges, the way he clung grimly to the handrail cable whenever the breeze shifted them at all. She’d have tried to say something reassuring, but knowing Jack, he’d just smack it back into her face, and both their tempers were already far too strained by dismal weather and the close quarters for her to risk upsetting the fragile peace between them.

At any rate, he seemed to have regained his nerve; when she glanced back at him just past the midpoint, he pushed his sopping hair out of his eyes to flash her a grin. “Gotta say, we never had anything like this back in New York.”

“No,” Peggy agreed, turning back. She was loathe to admit it, but her own nerves weren’t quite as steady as they could have been, seeing the treetops swaying between the gaps of the wood a dozen yards below her feet. At least if she was jumping out of a plane, she’d have a parachute. “Nor in London.”

“We coulda used them, though. You ever been to Ithaca?”

“I can’t say as I have.”

“Full of gorges like this. Beautiful place, but you get a hell of a lot of jumpers. Fella I knew threw himself off a bridge while we were at Cornell. Couldn’t handle the pressure.”

Peggy pressed her lips together. “I do hope you’ll restrain yourself from diving into the ravine. I’ve quite enough to do without having climb down to fish your corpse out of a river.”

“Thanks, Carter, I knew you cared.”

She had reached the end of the bridge, where the posts were sunk deep in the rocky soil. With a sigh of relief, she stepped onto the ledge, relishing the feel of solid earth beneath her feet. She began to turn, a light-hearted retort on her lips, then paused.

The left anchor cable was frayed, a few feet from the ledge, the fibers coming loose even as she watched.

A bolt of cold fear shot through her. Jack was still making his careful way up the incline; half a dozen yards away, and it might as well have been a mile.

“Jack,” she said sharply, and he froze at the tone. Peggy caught a flash of his white face, his startled blue eyes, but there was no _time_ ; she scrambled to the ledge, reaching for the unravelling cable. If she could only catch it before—

It snapped.

The bridge twisted, snapping violently at the recoil. Encumbered by the bulky radio pack, Jack stumbled to the side; his hands scrabbled for purchase and failed to find it. Peggy jolted forward, flinging a hand out uselessly— it was too far, much too far—

In the space between one breath and the next, he was gone.

She stumbled, breathless and gasping, and felt the ledge beginning to crumble beneath her, fell back and landed hard on the rocky soil. The bridge was still snapping in the brisk wind, sending up sprays of water. Jack had vanished into the swaying trees beneath without a trace.

Peggy stared blankly at the space where he’d been for several stunned seconds, then shook her head briskly and began unstrapping her pack. He hadn’t been that far from the edge. With tree branches to break his momentum, it was perfectly possible to survive such a fall.

Not just possible: probable. Practically a sure thing. She refused to countenance any other option.

The spot where the bridge was anchored was a less than ideal place to begin her descent; the ledge had a slight overhang, and beneath it were several feet of steep, wet, rock with no footholds that she could see.

“Jack,” she called, cupping her hands around her mouth.

There was no answer. No matter; the river below was fat with rain, rushing over tumbled boulders with a watery roar. She could hear it even from where she stood; he was surely closer, where it would be loud enough to drown out the sound of her voice.

“Jack,” she called again, anyway. “I’m coming down, but I’ll have to work my way around. I’ll be as quick as I can. Stay where you are.”

More silence, broken only by the sound of the rain. She squinted, shielding her eyes, but all she could see were the green treetops swaying in the sheeting rain. A few yards away, the cliff face bulged out, and a few stunted trees clung to the cracks in the rocks; that seemed the likeliest spot to begin her descent.

She bent over her bag, quickly sifting through damp clothes and toiletries wrapped--rather ineffectively--in oilcloth. The first aid kit in its battered tin had been well-stocked when they set out, at least, and they’d been lucky thus far; aside from a few plasters, everything should still be there.

There was no rope. It had been in Jack’s pack, along with the radio. Foolish of them, but there was nothing to be done for it now. She shoved the kit into her belt-pouch, strapped the pack back onto her shoulders and stood, then paused as something caught her eye.

It was nothing extraordinary, just a bit of kicked-up earth near the anchor posts. Nothing worth noticing, really, except that as she stood there was the distinctly metallic gleam of something half-buried in the wet soil. A thin blade, like something that would fit a safety razor: perfectly ordinary, if it weren’t for the fact that they hadn’t encountered any other humans for as long as they’d been in the mountains. Even the local herders didn’t venture up this time of the year. There was no earthly reason for such an item to be here, unless…

Her eyes were drawn to the footbridge, still flapping gracelessly in the wind. The broken cable was several feet from the edge; it was impossible to tell from here whether or not it had been cut.

And it didn’t matter. Sabotage or accident— there was nothing she could do about that now, other than hope that the saboteur didn’t return. Getting to Jack was still the priority.

Still, she could feel an uncomfortable prickling at the back of her neck as she made her way over to the bulge in the cliff face. Just nerves, she thought— she hoped.

The descent was treacherous, her progress slower than she would have liked. Her nerves were thrumming with the need to _move_ , but she forced herself to caution, testing each foothold before she put her weight on it, inching slowly down the steep incline. In minutes, her boots were full of grit, her hands abraded from the rough tree bark. There were gloves in her pack, but it was too late to go back now.

At long last, the slope began to flatten out, enough at least that she could walk without clinging like a creeper vine to every jutting rock and tree. She straightened and peered around.

Still no sign of Jack. She was, she thought, quite near to where he would have landed, but between the sheeting rain and the thick, verdant underbrush, it was difficult to see very far. The cliff face loomed above her, looking quite a bit taller from this angle than it had from above. It was a long fall…

With a shake of her head, she banished the thought and pushed her way deeper into the brush.

She heard Jack before she saw him, and she’d never admit the wash of relief that swept through her at the sound of his weak groan. “Jack!”

He didn’t respond, and as Peggy pushed through a tall bramble to the spot where he lay, she could see why.

It looked as though he had landed in some sort of springy bramble. It had broken his fall and likely saved his life, but not without cost: his jacket and trousers were rent in a dozen places, and blood seeped through onto the dark-colored canvas. His leg was twisted at an angle that left her no doubt that it was broken; it looked as though he’d tried to drag himself free of the wreckage of the bramble before giving it up as a bad job.

As she crashed through the underbrush, he flailed weakly; it took her a moment to realize that he was reaching for his sidearm. Left-handed; his right arm seemed to be pinned under his pack, but Peggy wasn’t eager to find out whether or not he could actually aim a gun properly with his off hand.

“Agent Thompson,” she said firmly, “if you shoot me after I’ve just climbed down a cliff face on your behalf, I shall be very cross with you.”

A weak groan, and then his hand dropped and he said, without lifting his head, “That’s Chief Thompson to you, Carter.”

Peggy sniffed and began picking her way over to Jack somewhat more carefully. There was blood on the broad leaves beneath him. It was thinning too rapidly in the downpour for her to tell quite how much there was, but it didn’t seem like too alarming an amount. Assuming he wasn’t bleeding internally, that was. “Very well, _Chief_. Where are you injured?”

“Everywhere,” Jack groaned, shifting slightly and peering up at her. There was blood in his hair, but his eyes seemed to be dilating properly. That was something, at least. He wiped at his face with his free hand, grimaced. “Leg’s busted. Pretty sure I landed on the radio pack, so that’s not gonna be any use. I thought you said these bridges were supposed safe.”

“I believe it may have been sabotaged. The cable was cut, and I found a razor near the top.”

“Sabotaged,” Jack said resignedly, letting his head drop. “That figures. For the record, this has been the mission from hell.”

“If you recall, you were the one who wanted to come along. Stop moving. That leg will need to be splinted.”

“Must have been out of my mind,” he muttered, then subsided when she fixed him with a glare. “Please tell me you’ve done that before.”

“Of course.” It wasn’t even, strictly speaking, a lie. Certainly she’d _seen_ it done, more than once. Assisted, even. “Even so, I don’t think we’ll be climbing out of here tonight.”

“Sound assessment, Agent Carter.” There was hardly any bite to it, she noticed worriedly. “Alright, let’s do this.”

“I’ll need to find something to brace it with,” Peggy said. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

Fortunately, it wasn’t hard to find a pair of suitable branches. She stripped them quickly of leaves with her utility knife, and dragged them back to where Jack lay. He’d flung his arm over his eyes and looked as pale as death, but he was still breathing, at least.

God willing, it was only the leg that was broken. That would be horribly unpleasant for him and would seriously complicate their extraction, but if he had internal injuries…

If he did, there was nothing she could do about it, so there was no sense in borrowing trouble. The leg at least was a manageable problem. “I’ll need your belt.”

“At least buy a fellow a drink first,” Jack said, and moved his arm, blinking up at her through wet eyelashes. “What for?”

“Ties. Unless you’d like me to cut strips out of your shirt, that is.”

“Belt it is,” Jack agreed, reaching to unbuckle it. Peggy watched him make three fumbling one-handed tries before batting his fingers away and doing it herself. It was, perhaps, a mark of his condition that he didn’t even try to protest. It would normally have been an uncomfortable intimacy, but right now, that was the last thing on her mind.

Jack’s leg was more or less straight, and the fracture didn’t appear to be compound, at least. She eased the belt through the gap beneath his knee and slid it down his calf to below the fracture, moving as carefully as possible to avoid jostling him. Jack hissed out a stifled expletive through his teeth, and she paused and glanced up at him; his face had gone the color of old porridge. When he realized that she was looking at him, though, he shook his head with some visible effort. “Just get it over with, Carter.”

He was right, of course. Lingering over the task wouldn’t make it any more pleasant for either of them. She pulled off her own belt as well and repeated the process just above his knee, doing her best to ignore the small pained noises that he was clearly trying to muffle. She didn’t bother with reassurances. The kindest thing to do was work quickly.

It was the work of a few minutes to secure the straight branches to his leg, immobilizing it, though she did end up having to sacrifice a shirt from her pack for padding and extra ties to secure the whole mess.

She slid her fingers under the bindings to make sure that they weren’t too tight and sat back on her heels, pushing her sopping hair out of her face. “All right?”

“Aces.” Jack’s voice was a thin, gray shadow of itself. “Give me a hand up, I’ll go run a marathon.”

“A simple ‘yes’ would suffice,” Peggy said, rather more snippily than she meant to. The sky was beginning to darken overhead; she’d lost track of the time, but it had to be getting close to nightfall. They’d planned to make camp near a stream up at the top of the gorge— likely a tributary of the river that was rushing by below them— but of course that was impossible now. Jack _could_ probably walk, if need be, and if it came to that she was perfectly capable of carrying him, but climbing a steep ravine in the rain was another story entirely.

No, they’d be camping where they were tonight. Camping cold, too, it looked like, unless the rain let up; any fire she tried to make in this would be drowned immediately.

Ah, well. She’d spent more uncomfortable nights. And in any case, Jack would certainly be more uncomfortable by far, so it wouldn’t do to sit feeling sorry for herself. “Are you injured anywhere else?”

“My hand,” he said, and made an abortive movement with his right arm, stopping on a hiss. “Don’t know what’s wrong with it, but it’s not good.”

“Very well, hold still. I’m going to see if I can get the pack off of you.”

The full pack, along with the bulky field radio, was quite heavy, and the straps were soaking wet and tangled, so it took her several minutes to get Jack free of them without jostling him too badly. He hissed out a pained noise through his teeth when she shifted the pack off of him, and when she finally eased the strap off of his arm, she could see why. He must have put his hands out in an effort to break his fall, and his right palm was impaled on a splinter of wood a hands-breadth long. It appeared to have gone clean through and out the other side, and blood oozed thickly from the wound.

Jack glanced at it, went a shade paler, and quickly looked away. Peggy swallowed and reminded herself that she’d certainly dealt with far worse than this on the battlefield; this looked gruesome and had to hurt like blazes, but as injuries went, it wasn’t especially dire. Still, she was as gentle as she could be when she eased the strap down his arm and over his injured hand.

“Well,” she said into the silence. “You’re right. That certainly is not good.”

Jack made a sound somewhere between a cough and a laugh. “You have a talent for understatement.”

“May I see?” she asked, and waited for his wary nod before taking his hand gently in both of hers. In the dimming light, it was difficult to tell for sure, but it looked as though the tendons were intact, the injury relatively clean. The splinter was actually more of a long thorn, and it had sliced rather than torn through the flesh. “Actually, this isn’t as bad as it could be. I think I can just pull the thorn out and wrap it, but I’m going to set up the tent first so I’m not trying to dig bits of wood out of you in the pitch dark and pouring rain.”

“Fine,” Jack said. “As long as you’re not expecting me to be useful, here.”

“Oh, believe me, Jack, I would never expect anything so preposterous.”

* * *

It didn’t actually take her all that long to get the tent set up, although it would have been an easier job with two people; she’d gotten accustomed to the nightly ritual of it, and even without Jack’s extra pair of hands, the job went quickly. Jack himself was unnervingly quiet, even when she fumbled a stake in cold fingers and had to root through the underbrush to find it. It wasn’t that she particularly _wanted_ his snide commentary on her wilderness skills or lack thereof, but the lack of it was… unsettling. Especially with the dark closing in, and the rain and creaking branches playing tricks on her ears. She hadn’t forgotten their unknown saboteur, and more than once she paused, thinking that she could hear another person crashing through the underbrush.

The tent was damp and cramped with the both of them and all of their gear— and, of course, would offer no protection against an assailant, should one appear— but it was nevertheless a relief to get inside.

“All right,” Peggy said, once she’d got Jack settled on the damp sleeping bag. “Let’s have a look at that hand.”

Moving had been hard for him, clearly, even with her shouldering most of his weight; his face was an unhealthy, sickly color that couldn’t entirely be explained by the thin light of the hissing kerosene lamp dangling from the cross-pole, and his injured hand shook badly when he held it out to her. It was unpleasantly clammy to the touch.

“Are you cold?” she asked quietly, turning his hand over in both of hers. The rain had, at the very least, washed the injury clean; there was very little blood. That would certainly change if she pulled the thorn out, and if they’d been anywhere near civilization, she would have simply immobilized it and waited for a doctor.

There was a very real chance that it would be days before she could get him to anything resembling proper medical attention, though, days during which he might have to move, would certainly require the use of two hands.

Jack blinked at her, as if he was trying very hard to focus, and very slowly shook his head. “N-no. Yes. Maybe?”

The confusion, she thought, was probably a bad sign. The air wasn’t _that_ cold, and she was quite warm from exertion even in her soaking wet clothes. Then again, Jack had been lying in the cold, wet dirt with a badly broken leg for the better part of an hour. “Well, let me get this cleaned up, and we’ll get you settled.”

“Yes, mother,” he said obediently, and squeezed his eyes shut, a comical little-boy expression that was rather marred by the pallor of his cheeks.

Peggy rather wished that _she_ didn’t have to look at his hand either, but there was nothing for it. The thicker base of the thorn protruded slightly from the center of his palm. She gripped it firmly between her thumb and forefinger and yanked it out with a single sharp tug.

Jack shuddered, but didn’t make a sound. Blood welled up, dripping on the sleeping bag and on the knee of her trousers; she quickly discarded the thorn and wrapped his hand in bandaging, pressing tightly to stem the bleeding. She could feel his pulse beneath her fingers.

“Ow,” he said, finally, and shook his head dazedly.

“Oh, don’t be a baby,” she said absently, leaning across him to dig one-handed through the first aid kit. “Can you move your fingers?”

“Piece of advice, Carter: don’t ever try to take up nursing. You got a worse bedside manner than my drill sergeant.” Still, after a moment, to her relief, she felt the bones in his hand move as he flexed his fingers.

“I _was_ a drill sergeant, for a bit,” she said, and lifted the bandage briefly. The bleeding was already beginning to slow. Good. Now as long as they could avoid an infection setting in…

Well, if they were out here long enough for an infection to set in, they’d have an entirely different set of problems.

“Why does that not surprise me,” Jack muttered. He was shivering harder now, jaw clenched against the shudders. His broken leg stuck out awkwardly in front of him; it occurred to her, belatedly, that she ought to have gotten him out of his soaking wet trousers before splinting it, but it was too late for that now.

“Really, Jack, if you’d bothered to read the personnel files, it shouldn’t surprise you,” she said briskly. “We’ll need to see if we can repair the radio, but the first order of business is to get you warmed up. You’re no good to me or yourself if you die of hypothermia.”

“You’re all heart.”

She checked the bandage again and, satisfied that it wasn’t going to soak through in the immediate future, secured it. “There. Now, do you think you can get your own shirt off, or shall I help you?”

Jack blinked at her. “What?”

“Your shirt,” Peggy repeated, pulling his pack to her and beginning to rummage through it. The contents were all damp, of course, but still, they’d be an improvement over the shirt he was wearing, which was literally dripping muddy water. “Oh, don’t be a prude. There’s nothing you’ve got that I haven’t seen before.”

“It’s not your delicate sensibilities I’m worried about, it’s my hide if your husband gets wind of this,” Jack said, but he began clumsily unbuttoning his shirt all the same. She watched just long enough to see that the fingers of his bandaged right hand seemed to be working properly, and then turned her back to give him some semblance of privacy.

“Daniel has complete faith in your honor, I’m sure.”

Jack’s only response was a snort. His shirt and undershirt hit the tent floor with a wet, slopping noise, and he took the slightly drier clothes that she held out to him. She occupied herself with digging out her own set of dry-ish clothes, taking care to stay off of the sleeping bags as much as possible. “Close your eyes.”

She didn’t bother checking to see that he had before stripping out of her blouse and trousers. There was a definite chill in the air now, even with the two of them in the little tent, and she dressed again quickly, kicking her wet clothes to the foot of the tent with Jack’s and curling under her sleeping bag. Jack had already flung his own sleeping bag haphazardly over his body, his broken leg sticking out awkwardly. He was still shivering visibly, but at least some of the color had come back into his face.

“Speaking of Sousa,” he said eventually, “how long until we miss our check-in?”

“We already have done,” Peggy said, huddling into the dubious embrace of the damp, scratchy wool liner. At least it was warm. “It was supposed to be tonight. He’ll be looking for us.”

Jack pillowed his good arm beneath his head, his chin tilted back. The dim lantern-light painted his features in slices of shadow. “That’s a lot of area to search.”

“He’ll find us,” Peggy said firmly.

She knew Jack well enough, by now, to read the skepticism in the slight curl of his mouth, but he didn’t voice it out loud. “Probably help if we could get the radio working.”

“How likely is it that we could fix it?”

“Depends,” Jack said, and levered himself painfully upright. “If the tubes are smashed, we’re in deep…” he trailed off, glanced at her, and replaced the expletive he’d clearly been about to use with “...trouble.”

Peggy rolled her eyes, but didn’t comment. She’d long since given up trying to get Jack— or Daniel, for that matter, or any of the other men— to stop censoring his language around her. “If not?”

“Hard to say. Maybe. It landed on me, so the impact was a little bit cushioned, anyway.”

“Lucky, that,” Peggy said dryly, and was rewarded with a brief smile. “Have you got a tool kit?”

“Yeah, it’s—” Jack twisted to pull his bag toward him, then blanched when it bumped roughly against his broken leg. “—Or you could get it,” he wheezed, after a moment.

“Why don’t you _lie still_ ,” Peggy said, exasperated, “and if I need your assistance, I’ll ask for it.”

“I think the housing for the volume knob is broken,” Jack said, and then subsided at her look.

To her annoyance, it looked as though he was right. The plastic knob had snapped entirely off, and the pin was pushed down inside the case, rattling against the metal when she jostled it. When she got the case open, though, the vacuum tubes appeared undamaged; as long as the filaments inside weren’t broken, they might even have a chance at repairing it.

“You’ll need to strip the wires and bypass the pot,” Jack interjected. “The volume won’t be adjustable—”

“—but it will work,” Peggy finished, fishing out her utility knife and detaching the wires from the potentiometer. “Yes, thank you, Chief, I have done field repairs before.”

“ _Hopefully_ it’ll work,” Jack said. “If the filaments aren’t damaged. You said you thought the bridge was sabotaged.”

Peggy glanced up at him, her annoyance derailed by the sudden change in topic. “It looked as though someone had been up there. I couldn’t get a good look at the cable, but it seems...unlikely that it would just snap on its own.”

“You think it was Leviathan?”

“Or local guerillas. It might have nothing to do with us.”

“You wanna bank on that?”

“Not really,” Peggy admitted, closing her knife and twisting the radio wires together. The speaker came live with a shriek of static that made both of them wince. “Well, I’d say that’s working, anyway.”

“Hope there weren’t any unfriendlies around to hear that,” Jack remarked. “Or bears.”

“Have you seen any bears, Jack?” Peggy asked, reaching for the mouthpiece. “Base, come in. Base, this is Agent Carter, do you read me?”

There was a long, worrying silence broken only by static, and then a vaguely familiar male voice said, “We read you, Agent Carter. Good to hear your voice, ma’am.”

Peggy let out a long sigh. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see some of the tension leave Jack’s shoulders. “Likewise. Base, we need a medical extraction. Chief Thompson is injured; he’s stable, but immobilized. We’re approximately a quarter-mile northwest of the footbridge at…” she racked her brain for a second to recall the coordinates, then recited them.

Another long silence, and then, “We read you. Any hostiles?”

“Not yet,” Peggy said. “What’s your ETA? And where is Chief Sousa?”

“We’re scrambling a chopper now. It’ll take a couple of hours to reach you, though. Chief Sousa, uh…” His voice dropped off for a second, then he said, “He, uh, took a Jeep up when you missed your check-in.”

“He _what?_ ” Peggy said sharply. “No, never mind, I read you. Let’s keep radio silence unless necessary, shall we? I’m not sure who’s out here.”

“Copy that, Agent Carter. Base out.”

She replaced the mouthpiece, stared at it for a moment, then said, almost to herself, “That _wanker_.”

Jack made a choking sound, and she glanced at him, alarmed, before realizing that he was laughing.

“Oh, don’t start," she said, putting a hand up to hide her own reluctant smile.

* * *

 

Jack took the first watch, on the argument that his leg hurt too much for him to sleep anyway. Beyond extracting a promise that he’d actually wake her when it was her turn, Peggy didn’t protest much; it wasn’t especially late, but she’d already been hiking most of the day, and that was before all the excitement. Jack dimmed the lantern, and she was asleep almost the instant she put her head down.

She woke, groggy and disoriented, to a firm hand on her shoulder. The tent was dark.

“Shh,” Jack whispered preemptively, and she shut her mouth on the question she’d been about to ask.

The rain had let up, but there was still a muggy dampness lingering in the air that made it like breathing swamp water. She eased herself upright, straining her eyes, but the dim moonlight filtering through the canvas sides of the tent was barely enough to see the outline of Jack’s body. His grip on her shoulder loosened, and he patted his way down her arm until he found her hand, pressed the hard shape of a pistol into it.

Peggy curled her fingers around it, glad that the darkness hid her expression. It was sensible, of course; his dominant hand was badly injured, and even if it hadn’t been, she was the better shot. But it was unlike Jack to give up any advantage.

There was no time to dwell on it, though; over the crashing sound of the water below, so monotonous that she’d managed to tune it out almost entirely, she could hear voices. People.

“They’re not locals,” Jack said in a thread of a whisper, and when she strained her ears, she could tell that he was right. The cadence was all wrong; the men— there were at least two of them— were speaking Russian, not Spanish. Her grasp of the language was imperfect, though, and from this distance she couldn’t quite make out the words.

It seemed that they could put paid to the notion that the sabotage had nothing to do with them. Belatedly, she wished she’d taken a few moments to erase the traces of their presence from the top of the cliff; it would be difficult for anyone but an experienced tracker to track them through the thick underbrush here in the dark, and their tent was low to the ground and well-hidden enough by the overhanging thicket that they were unlikely to be found unless the intruders literally stumbled over them, but the top of the cliff was all bare earth and mud, and she knew she’d left plenty of footprints.

If the men were actually searching for them, they were in a great deal of trouble. Hopefully, that wasn’t the case.

Footsteps were approaching. Three men, by the sound of it, their boots squelching in the soft, wet earth.

“ _...must have gone in the river,”_ one of them said, and a torch beam swung overhead. Peggy ducked instinctively, foolishly, and she could hear Jack’s sharp intake of breath. He was still gripping her arm; she didn’t even think he knew he was doing it, and his fingers were bruisingly tight.

“ _Komdiv Avdronin wanted the entire area searched—”_

“ _Then he can come freeze his balls off looking for dead Americans in the dark. There’s no one here. We can come back in the daytime._ ”

The third man shifted his feet, cracking sticks beneath his heel. It was hard to estimate just by the sound, but Peggy guessed that they were no more than eight yards away. Close enough to shoot with a handgun, but even given the element of surprise the odds were poor. Safer just to hold still and hope that the shoddy discipline common to any soldier in a miserable post took care of the job for them.

She held her breath, waiting for the third man to weigh in. There was an agonizing moment of silence, and then he sighed, and said, finally, “ _I’m with Pavel. This is pointless; we can continue the search in daylight._ ”

Shakily, Peggy let out the breath she’d been holding. The footsteps began to retreat back toward the river, and she could hear Jack mouth the bare shape of a curse word, his grip on her arm relaxing.

So of course it was then that the radio squealed to life, shockingly loud. “Agent Carter? Come in, Agent Carter—”

“Fuck, damn it!” Jack hissed, diving for it, but it was too late. There was a shout from down-river, and the torch beam swung across their tent again, blindingly bright even through the thick canvas. There was another shout from outside. They were found.

Peggy glanced at Jack, who was twisted in an ungainly heap over the radio, made several quick calculations, then snatched up the spare ammunition from the top of her pack and knelt up to open the tent flap.

“Stay here,” she whispered.

“What?” Jack whispered back, and then, horrified comprehension dawning in his voice, “No, wait, Carter— Peggy, don’t—”

She didn’t wait to hear the end of the sentence before she lunged out of the tent, gun up, firing blind in the direction of the voices.

There was a scream, and the shockingly loud rattle of return fire, but she made it to the nearest tree intact. Someone— the unlucky Pavel, she thought— was cursing loudly.

She just hoped that those three were the only ones out on patrol. Three she could probably handle, especially since they didn’t sound as though they were the Red Army’s finest. She could hear them crashing through the underbrush, and she took advantage of the noise to dart uphill, away from the riverbank. The foliage was thicker here and even without a torch, if she could make it to high ground, she’d have a better vantage point.

That, and she’d draw them away from Jack. There was another gun in his pack, and several spare magazines, but he couldn’t move quickly or quietly; even armed, he’d be a sitting duck. They hadn’t brought a rifle or any other long range weaponry. Right now that seemed like a terrible oversight, but of course they hadn’t been expecting to encounter any hostiles. The facility, if it even existed, was supposed to have been abandoned during the war.

It certainly didn’t seem to be abandoned now, Peggy mused, listening for the sound of pursuit. They were still crashing around below, but since they were well away from the tent, it didn’t seem wise to draw their attention just now. She’d winged at least one of them, although it hadn’t sounded as though his injury was too dire. Perhaps if she could flank them…

Another torch beam approached from downstream, jouncing slightly as its carrier jogged, and she let out a very unladylike curse under her breath.

“ _...going on here?_ ” she heard, and the response was quick and low enough that she missed half of the words. She understood enough to get the gist, though.

“ _...Americans… shot me, bastards… into the woods…”_

“ _...reinforcements…”_

Lovely. Wonderful. Four hostiles, and the imminent approach of more. If she survived this, she was going to be having a serious talk with Jack about his intelligence officers and their recon skills— or lack thereof.

Oh, and it looked as though they were on the move again, this time headed more or less in her direction. Peggy grimaced in the dark, wishing she’d thought to count her bullets earlier; the magazine was at least half-full, and there was a spare in her pocket, but after that, she was going to be in a great deal of trouble.

Best to make each shot count, then. If there was a quieter way— she had no knife, but if there was a heavy branch about…

A bit of scrabbling around in the darkness, and she was rewarded with a waterlogged length of twisted wood a yard or so long. That would do nicely.

By the torch beams, they had spread out to look for her; that was good, as long as they kept coming this way. She waited until the nearest man had passed her by, close enough that she could almost have reached out and touched him, and then moved, as quickly and quietly as she could. Her boots were heavy, sturdy things, unsuited to stealthy movement in the dark, but by the time the man realized she was there, it was too late. He turned, torch beam sweeping over her, his mouth opening in a shout, and she swung with all her might. Wood met skull with an audible _crack,_ and he fell without a sound. Peggy scooped up his gun and torch, switched the latter off— it would do her no good to advertise her location— and pocketed the former.

One down, three to go.

She dispatched another soldier in similar fashion, and that was when things started to get messy. The third man was quicker than the other two; he managed to duck the blow, reaching up to twist the branch out of her hands. She dropped it before he could dislocate her wrists, but then he was upon her. A heavy blow caught her in the jaw, sending her dazed and stumbling; she shook off the dizziness and rammed a shoulder into his gut— inelegant, but it worked. He hit the ground, the torch rolling out of his hand and spinning crazy, disorienting arcs of light over the entire scene; she could see him reaching for his gun, though, and she drew and fired entirely on reflex.

His body jerked, and went still. In the ringing silence that followed, there was the unmistakable sound of a hammer being drawn behind her.

She had time to suck in a sharp breath, and then there was the sharp report of a pistol— once, twice, three times. Peggy felt her body jerk, and it took several confused seconds to understand that she wasn’t hit.

The body of the fourth soldier hit the ground with a graceless _thud_ , and she looked up to see Jack, leaning heavily on a tree-trunk, looking white as a sheet in the torchlight, gun still trained on the fallen soldier.

Peggy stared at him for several moments before she could string words together. “I thought I told you to stay where you were,” she managed finally.

Jack flashed her a wan shadow of a grin. “I’m still your boss, Carter. You don’t get to give me orders. Lucky for you, from the looks of things.”

He moved to holster his gun, and it must have overbalanced him. His lean became a stumble, and she rushed to catch him before he fell flat on his face. He leaned into her, warm and heavy and ungainly as a very lanky sack of potatoes.

“You insufferable wanker,” she said softly.

He snorted into her shoulder. “You’re welcome.”

Peggy adjusted her grip on his shoulders, bracing herself against the weight of him. They stood like that for a long moment, slumped together in something that was almost an embrace, before she became aware of a low rumble, distant at first, then louder as it approached, reverberating through the wet night air. She felt Jack shift against her, and looked up, blinking, in time to see the helicopter descending out of the cloudy sky. A Sikorsky, light-colored and ungainly against the dark sky—that was an American craft.

“Oh, thank Christ,” Jack muttered, all in a rush, and she laughed breathlessly, signaled with her torch as the floodlights swept the valley from above. “They’re not gonna be able to land—”

It seemed that the rescue crew had already thought of that, though. A rope ladder came coiling down from above, the end thumping softly on the forest floor. Peggy squinted at it in the dark. “Will you be able to manage that?”

“Guess we’ll see.”

The answer, as it turned out was ‘yes, but just barely.’ It was, fortunately, not a terribly long climb, but his progress was agonizingly slow, and more than once Peggy caught herself looking nervously around, expecting another bunch of soldiers to burst out of the underbrush.

Foolishness, of course. Paranoia. If there were any reinforcements in range, they’d be here already.

At long last, Jack was hauled into the waiting helicopter, and the rope ladder descended again. Peggy abandoned her torch to scamper up it like a squirrel, and it was only when she was safely on board and the helicopter was lifting away that she looked up to see Daniel’s anxious face peering at her over the shoulder of the medic who was trying to asses her for injuries.

Impatient, she shoved the man aside. “I’m quite alright, thank you. See to Chief Thompson, please.”

“Peggy—” Daniel began, but he shut up in a hurry when she kissed him, hard, on the lips.

“Very professional, Agent Carter,” came Jack’s drawling voice from the other end of the bay. How he could see anything at all with the three medics kneeling over him, taking apart her amateur splint, she neither knew nor cared. She made a rude gesture over her shoulder all the same.

“You two scared the hell out of us,” Daniel said, dropping his forehead against hers. He was, she realized, still wearing a suit and a sport jacket instead of any kind of proper gear.

“And you came charging to the rescue,” she said, unable to keep the affection out of her voice. “Daniel, I think we can unequivocally say that there is indeed a bunker nearby. And it is occupied. I suspect it’s located upstream, in the cliff face—”

“We’ll send a team back to check it out,” Daniel said firmly. “Pick anybody you want, I’ll give you a whole squad. For now, though, let’s get you two back to base. You look like a drowned rat.”

“So romantic,” Peggy murmured, but she was smiling as the helicopter lifted away into the dark sky.


End file.
